Present-mindedness
I will look at the concept of "present-mindedness" in today's final essay , "The Plea For Time." Toward the end of the essay, after the rather obsessive details on the construction of calendars for various purposes (religious, administrative, agricultural, etc.), Innis jumps to the modern era to talk about the time-bias of modern media. He claims that it is severely "present-minded." I feel that it is hard to argue with him there. Especially at the time of the essay's writing, radio and newspaper represented the ephemeral end of the spectrum and had been very successful at whipping up short-scale wartime fervor. On Innis's two dimensions of space and time, 20th century communication media clearly scored high on space and low on time. What I find hard to discern, on the other hand, is whether Innis thinks that space and time are inversely proportional (of course, in a rough sense, for lack of a better phrase). Reading this essay (of course) made me wonder how Innis would analyze today's communication media. The Internet's low barrier on copying makes archiving extremely easy, yet the Internet also has a global reach: the first medium I can think of to score high on both dimensions. Is the Internet hyper-presented-minded?
(I had to comment on the essay's tangent into academic culture. Those few pages had the hallmarks of a discussion over beers that might go something like, "No one appreciates me and it's hard to get funding. Those social scientists have sold their souls." Innis seems to lament the academic's former role as the guardian of knowledge.)